sciencehabit writes: Many deep-sea squid dispel an ink cloud to flee a predator, but one species goes a step farther: It ensures a getaway by counterattacking and then ditching the tips of its arms. These detached bits can continue to twitch and emit bioluminescent light—likely providing a vital distraction. By catching this strange maneuver on camera, scientists have established Octopoteuthis deletron as the only known squid to drop portions of its arms in self-defense, much as lizards drop their tails before escaping.

Clearly you don't know very much about how many counties in Texas operate. Sure, in Travis county (where Austin is located), it would be a minor offense. Right next door in Williamson county? Any contraband, including just a pipe, will guarantee an overnight stay in jail. Paraphernalia is a minimum of $500 fine. An oz of weed could net you a year's probation. Anything over a gram of any other illegal substance will be a felony, with 4-10 years probation if you take the plea bargain. It's fucking sickening.

Posting this on my Fire. It is most certainly an android device. In fact, the *only* differences I can discern between it and my cyanogenmod phone (as far as User Experience goes) are the custom launcher and lack of android market. After rooting and installing a regular launcher and the market, it works exactly like you'd expect an android tablet to work. Are people really so shallow that they think the launcher and skin define a whole different OS?

An anonymous reader writes: Chemistry researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory say they've improved the efficiency of typical solar cells by a whopping 80% by creating a 3-D nanocone-based solar cell platform. The technology tackles the problem of poor transport of charges generated by solar photons. These charges --" negative electrons and positive holes --" typically become trapped by defects in bulk materials and degrade performance. "We designed the three-dimensional structure to provide an intrinsic electric field distribution that promotes efficient charge transport and high efficiency in converting energy from sunlight into electricity." Bottom line, they say, is they've boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by 80 percent.

I love how everyone in this thread is commenting on the app like they have any idea what it actually did. Go do some research. The app wasn't promising anything. It wasn't called the "Gay Cure" app, it wasn't promoting a "cure" for anything. For the most part, it could be compared to a bible study app that was targeted to people with unwanted same-sex attraction, combined with some social interaction aspects.

Alan is a friend of mine. He's not evil or smug. He's not even remotely close. He's genuinely disappointed that something he felt could help other people like himself was censored simply because a bunch of people made a big deal about it.

In the interest of being truthful, the name of the app was Exodus International. There was nothing at all hateful or bigoted. This was aimed purely at people who had *unwanted* same-sex attraction, as is the entire organization behind it. People should really inform themselves about an organization before they start spewing rhetoric about how hateful they are. Exodus is not, and never will be, an anti-gay interest group. They sincerely want to help people, whether it's because they are fed up with the gay lifestyle, can't reconcile their same-sex attractions with their faith, or honestly just want information about whether there is another way. My family are close friends with Alan Chambers, as well as many other people within Exodus. If you are happy being gay, more power to you. They will never try to coerce someone into being "ex-gay", and they will never be a source of hatefulness to anyone. All they want to do is show that there might be another way of life that they believe is more fulfilling than the typical gay lifestyle.

On another note, this is yet another example of why the Android platform is light-years ahead of the iPhone platform. Never would have been removed, and even if it had been, the developer would have been free to distribute it themselves. While I completely understand that it is within Apple's rights to remove any app for any reason, I can't help but think that this sets a very bad precedent. If all it takes is a petition and enough public pressure to remove an app, who's to say what other legitimate apps might be taken down? I'll take my open(-ish) platform, thank you.

You can develop for Android on Mac, Linux, or Windows officially. It'll probably work on *BSD too. And if you consider using vi to edit text files bloatware, then yeah, I guess that's a problem. Sure, Google provides you with some nice Eclipse plugins that make development waaaaay easier, but if you can't run Eclipse for some reason, nobody is stopping you from writing the source and compiling it with make.

Okay, I'll bite. All of my servers are named after Transformers. Main server is Optimus, backup is Rodimus, media server is Soundwave, virtual machine host is Megatron, and virtual machines are all Decepticon names. If you don't get why I named them that way, you probably don't know Transformers very well, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is, all of these machines have DNS aliases that are more descriptive, i.e. www, fileserver, git, etc. all point to Optimus. vmhost points to Megatron. dbserver points to one of the virtual machines. That way, if a server is repurposed, I don't have to go in there and replace all the name instances on the box to something else (and for a well-used box with many running services, this can be daunting), or find out where that name is referenced on all the other boxes and rename them. I simply change the DNS entry and I'm done. All client services use the descriptive naming scheme (so our web application points to dbserver instead of Starscream), and it makes it really simple to change db servers: one DNS entry change. The personal name is the name of the box: unchanging, linked to the hardware. The DNS alias is a description of what the box does: easily changed, not hardware linked.

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @03:17PM
from the mash-downs dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."